# Wishful thinking

Gustavo Glusman (bmgustav@bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il)
Wed, 17 Jan 1996 09:16:05 PST

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    >Floating point numbers: They work just like integers, except a float
    >would be returned if 1 number in the expression was a float.
    >
    >;2+2 => 4
    >;2.0+2 => 4.0
    >;2.0+2.0 => 4.0

    One idea I had once is, instead of adding a new type (FLOAT), we could just
    overload the math functions for LIST values. Currently, a+b throws E_TYPE
    if a or b are lists.
    If a non-integer could be represented by a list of {mantissa STR, exponent
    NUM}, and the evaluating code were modified accordingly, this could provide
    the most powerful math... that I can imagine.

    E.g. {"23443",-8} would mean: 0.23443E-8
         {"23443",-8}*5 -> {"117215",-7}

    The reason for using a STR for the mantissa is that, for some applications,
    the <10 digits that a NUM value would provide, would be too little
    accuracy. A STR would be practically unlimited there.

    I toyed with the notion of making this hack myself (and call it MUP
    obviously ;) but it's too big a hack for me to finish in the next few
    years... :)

    -------------------------------------------------------------
    Gustavo Glusman               Founder/administrator of BioMOO
    -- Gustavo@bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il
    -- http://bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il/Gustavo
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